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Metabolism is how your body uses the food you eat as energy and then burns that energy to keep itself functioning at an optimal level. You need energy for every single activity, from breathing to walking to moving blood through your body. You might be doing things that can harm your metabolism and allow your body to store extra fat without even realizing it.

Dieting

Making a drastic cut in your calorie intake damages your metabolism and runs down your energy stores. Julie Funderburk, a clinical exercise physiologist, points out that when you consume fewer than 1,000 calories per day, your body goes into starvation mode and depresses your metabolism in order to hold onto its energy stores. As a result, your performance during activities of daily living suffers. Without adequate nutrition, metabolic contributors, including enzymes and hormones, drop to lower levels, notes the book "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism." Also, restrictive dieting makes you lose muscle along with fat, reducing your calorie needs and metabolic rate.

Getting Too Little Exercise

If you do too little exercise, you lose muscle and your metabolic rate declines, making you put on pounds. Muscle is active tissue, which has a higher metabolic rate and burns more calories than fat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A healthy muscle-to-fat ratio translates to stable weight loss. The more you sit around idle, the more muscle you lose and the more fat you gain. All this ultimately leads to countless health problems. The CDC suggests doing strength-training, which helps maintain and replace lost muscle tissue, burning lots of calories.

Consuming the Wrong Kinds of Foods

According to the book "Dare to Lose," wolfing down sugary, fatty foods regularly encourages your body to collect extra fuel as fat, affecting your muscle-to-fat ratio and metabolism. Moreover, eating sugar and other refined carbohydrates incessantly initiates carbohydrate sensitivity. With carbohydrate sensitivity, your blood sugar shoots up quickly, your body does not respond appropriately to insulin and you are therefore unable to metabolize glucose properly. Instead of using carbohydrates for energy purposes, your body stores carbohydrates as fat, making you gain weight. In addition, your body stores toxins in your fat tissues, so as you gain more fat, you can store more toxins, which may seep into your system and create metabolic chaos.

Cutting Back On Sleep

Sleep deprivation can reduce your capacity to perform basic metabolic functions, including regulating hormone secretion and processing and storing carbohydrates, according to a study published in the October 1999 issue of “The Lancet.” Researchers who carried out the study concluded that chronic sleep debt could lead to age-related ailments such as memory loss, diabetes, hypertension and obesity. Moreover, not having eight hours of sleep each night can impair glucose tolerance, an early symptom of diabetes, the study reported.

About the Author

Mala Srivastava covers health and business for several online publications. She holds a Master of Science in microbiology from India's HNB Garhwal University and a Master of Pharmaceutical Business Management from ICFAI University.